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Call to fast-track new cancer drugs

Kate Hagan

A public debate is needed to set priorities for funding high-cost cancer drugs ahead of an avalanche of new medicines to be launched by drug companies over the next few years, patients say.

Cancer Voices Australia spokeswoman Sally Crossing said patients were increasingly being left without access to new treatments due to delays having them listed on Australia's drug subsidy scheme, leaving patients to fund drugs themselves - sometimes at a cost of $100,000 for a course of treatment - or go without.

Ms Crossing and some oncologists are calling for a review of current processes for drugs to be listed on Australia's Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, saying it is too slow and inflexible to cope with a flood of new, targeted treatments due to be launched onto the Australian market.

A group of oncologists, patient advocates and drug companies called the Cancer Drugs Alliance wants a cancer drug fund to be established in the May federal budget to provide streamlined access to new treatments while current processes are reviewed.

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It says the fund, modelled on a similar fund in Britain, would cost about $200 million a year.

A spokesman for federal Health Minister Peter Dutton said new drugs needed to be assessed ''as both clinically and cost-effective'' before they could be subsidised by taxpayers under the PBS. He appeared to rule out calls for a special fund to fast-track cancer drugs, saying the government would ''consider any proposal that improves access and efficiency for all medicines within the PBS''.

Ms Crossing said patients valued rigorous PBS processes to evaluate the benefits and costs of new cancer drugs, but they were increasingly taking too long, resulting in a ''two-tier'' system in which only some patients were able to afford the latest advances.

She called for a public debate on priorities for funding new drugs and at what price, ''beyond the closed doors of negotiations between government and pharmaceutical companies''.

In some cases, new high-cost drugs offer small survival gains for patients at the end of their lives, prompting some oncologists to warn their benefits come at too high a cost.

A recent Cancer Voices statement acknowledged that research needed to develop new medicines had to be paid for and encouraged.